Tag Archives: activity-stream

Devir has a very important screencast for you today. He’s going to show you how you can become an active member of my new venture site, Lockergnome.NET. This is different from the original Lockergnome, so pay attention. Registration on the new site is open to anyone and everyone. It’s a place where you can easily integrate all of your social media activities into one spot on the web. Add a blog, pull in all of your feeds, and connect with others… all for no cost to you! Thanks to Devir for the screencast!

When you first visit the new site, you’ll of course need to sign up. Choose a screen name, and fill in your information. After you receive the activation email (usually within a moment or two), you can begin! I suggest first choosing a unique avatar, one that reflects you and who you are!

Next you’re going to want to set up your activity stream. This is pretty simple to do. At the top of the Lockergnome page, you’ll see where it says “My Blogs”. Hover your mouse there, and then hover over your blog name. From the second pop-out of choice, you want to choose “Dashboard”. If you’re not familiar with WordPress, don’t panic! It’s not difficult to learn.

On the left, down towards the bottom, you’ll see where it says “Lifestream”. This will take you to the page where you can add all of your feeds! You’ll see a huge list here. First, select a feed from the list. Once you do, you’ll need to enter your feed URL, and name it whatever you wish (or leave it at the default name). Lastly, you want to click “Add Feed” at the bottom. The page will refresh, and your feed is added.

You can make a status update or a blog post whenever you choose. However, you don’t “have” to do this. All of your activity on the social networks you add to your account will automatically be aggregated right there in one place!

Another thing you can do to personalize your page, is to play around with the widgets available. On the Dashboard, go to Appearance (over on the left), and then choose “Widgets”. You’ll see a number of different things you can drag-and-drop to help customize your Lifestream page a little more. For instance, you may want to have your personal blog or website content show up here on Lockergnome. You can do that! Drag the “RSS Feed” icon over to the right where it says “Sidebar 1”. Drop it right there when the little box shows up. Add the RSS feed URL from your blog or website, name it, and save it!

This site is simple to use, free to use, and important to use. You want to keep all of your information in one place. Lockergnome gives you a way to do that!

Thanks, Devir, for an excellent screencast that will hopefully help others get their new Lifestream set up!

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MyBlogLog is an interesting – and very popular – service, which boomed across the Internet a couple of years ago. Yahoo! bought it back in 2007 for a whopping ten million dollars. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites. It grew like crazy after the acquisition by the Yahoo! team, and then… well… it fizzled flat.

In a move that isn’t really surprising anyone, Yahoo! is reportedly shutting the service down in just a few weeks. Yahoo! is not confirming this, stating that they are “looking at options” for MyBlogLog, and that “closing it down is only one option”.

Bloggers are going to be ticked. The general consensus seems to be that Yahoo! let this potentially powerful service languish, and is wasting what could have been an amazing tool for us all. The data amassed from this piece of Heaven could have proven very valuable to people like you and me – had Yahoo! chosen to develop and cultivate it at all.

MyBlogLog doesn’t just show you who visited you. It also offers access to activity streams from social networks that users had associated with their MyBlogLog accounts. For example, there was a bookmarklet built that would show the recent bookmarks on Delicious, pictures from Flickr, and items posted to LinkedIn accounts of your latest blog visitors. How insanely useful could that have been?!

It’s possible MyBlogLog may have been ahead of its time. Services like Twitter and Facebook are just now becoming a major source for connectivity and sharing. So, why is it that Yahoo! isn’t starting to work on further developing and promoting this service… instead of just closing the doors? It makes no sense to me at all.